New GPU the best route?

So I have some extra money I can spend, my current rig is..

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
Processor: AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor (8 CPUs), ~4.0GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
Display Memory: 4038 MB
Dedicated Memory: 1990 MB
PSU Corsair AX1200W

I was wondering if the best route for me to upgrade, would be my GPU? If so, which one?

My main use of PC is gaming (WoW, and Steam) and school work.

What kind of hard drive are you running?

A 120GB SSD used just for the OS can be a very cheap way to speed things up, especially when combined with a 1TB-2TB slave drive for your games / apps.

That said, if you are interested on upgrading your GPU, what is your budget? I'm loving my Nvidia 960, and most folks on the forums here are loving their Nvidia 970's

I have a SSD for my OS and a 2tB Sata for my games. I have about 500$ I can spend.

Hard to go wrong with the GeForce 980

I suppose that you could upgrade your CPU on that budget, but I highly doubt that you'd notice a significant difference.

What's the reason for the desire to upgrade here? WoW shouldn't be causing too many troubles for you except on really big raids - what's the game that is making you think you need an upgrade? Knowing that will help us determine where your money would best be spent.

iamwhoiamtoday said:

What kind of hard drive are you running?

A 120GB SSD used just for the OS can be a very cheap way to speed things up, especially when combined with a 1TB-2TB slave drive for your games / apps.

That said, if you are interested on upgrading your GPU, what is your budget? I'm loving my Nvidia 960, and most folks on the forums here are loving their Nvidia 970's

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The GTX 960 is the same performance as the GTX 670 he already has.

The GTX 970 would be an improvement, but it's a lot of money to drop unless he's really GPU-limited. He needs to tell us the resolution he's gaming at, an what games he plays.

Unless you are hitting performance walls in demanding games, I'd wait until next year for Pascal. There's only so much Nvidia can do when they're stuck on the same process node for four years

And if he's going to get an SSD, the best value is the 240/250GB models. The price is literally 20-30 bucks more, and because of the extra memory chips (more chips = wider bandwidth, to a limited extent) the performance is much higher.

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-BX100-250GB-Internal-Solid/dp/B00RQA6TEI

What case do you have?

The game that's making me consider upgrading is not just the new expansion of WoW (Legion) but also fall out 4 and games beyond them. I get very excited about running games on Max and really taking in the visual splendor that art teams and designers put into it.

I game on a 32 inch 1080 p TV at 120hz.

Also my case is a cooler master I think striker 2 it's a full tower I know that.

Luni said:

The game that's making me consider upgrading is not just the new expansion of WoW (Legion) but also fall out 4 and games beyond them. I get very excited about running games on Max and really taking in the visual splendor that art teams and designers put into it.

I game on a 32 inch 1080 p TV at 120hz.

Also my case is a cooler master I think striker 2 it's a full tower I know that.

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Okay, but right now you can pretty-much max-out games at 1080p with your GTX 670. It doesn't sound like you play twitch FPS shooters, so you won't mind a slightly lower frame rate.

And we can't be sure how more higher graphical power Fallout 4 will require UNTIL IT IS RELEASED, so why not sit on your GPU for now? The GTX 970 is not going anywhere

I'm just saying that there's going to be a very large GPU upgrade expected in 6-9 months, so unless you absolutely need it NOW, I would suggest waiting. We should see a very large performance increase for the same price.

Luni said:

The game that's making me consider upgrading is not just the new expansion of WoW (Legion) but also fall out 4 and games beyond them. I get very excited about running games on Max and really taking in the visual splendor that art teams and designers put into it.

I game on a 32 inch 1080 p TV at 120hz.

Also my case is a cooler master I think striker 2 it's a full tower I know that.

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Thanks for the response.

So can I assume that you are seeing some problems with your performance in WoW? If you are, the problem is likely with your CPU's single-threaded performance rather than any problems you might be having with your GPU. If you know for a fact that your GPU is giving you trouble, you might consider checking whether your drivers are up to date for that card; it should be giving you no major problems. It is as fast as (or slightly faster than) my GTX 760, and that card gives me very acceptable 1080p60fps performance. Sure, that's half the frames of a 120hz monitor such as yours, but it is generally considered the standard.

If you absolutely must have 120fps or near performance, you could upgrade to a 970, 980, or 390X right now, but I personally would also wait as others have been saying. Your next upgrade will probably be in the form of a CPU/mobo upgrade, and, as much as I hate to say it, probably a move over to Intel.

A cheaper way around that would be to seriously upgrade your overclocking equipment (get a really nice AIO water loop for that CPU and some good fans blowing on your VRMs, as well as a nice PSU if your current model is lackluster), and overclock that CPU up as near 5ghz as you can get it. That's probably the cheapest up-front cost option available to you in terms of making a meaningful upgrade to your present system.

All right I am willing to wait if there is a bigger performance bump coming, my FPS in WoW currently sits at 50-60 FPS in current expansion content, sometimes it goes above 60, sometimes it goes below it. I've planned on going Intel eventually but was also wondering if their Six core processors are worth it, or If I should stick with their quad cores?

Yeah, WoW is still single-threaded even today. We have some picky players here that aren't satisfied with their Core i5 2500k at 5.0 GHz!

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1871292

Your processor at stock is beaten by that overclocked Core i5 by about 50-70%.

In fact, you should send a Private Message to GotNoRice, I'm sure he'd be able to help you with suggestions if your frame rate is not to your liking in WoW.

Luni said:

All right I am willing to wait if there is a bigger performance bump coming, my FPS in WoW currently sits at 50-60 FPS in current expansion content, sometimes it goes above 60, sometimes it goes below it. I've planned on going Intel eventually but was also wondering if their Six core processors are worth it, or If I should stick with their quad cores?

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Overclock your FX-8350 to 4.5ghz - a very attainable overclock, and you should almost never see your FPS dip below 60.

If you switched over to Intel today, you could actually go with the Intel Core i3-4370 or the
Intel Core i3‑4170 (3.8 and 3.7ghz respectively) - or even go with an overclocked Pentium G3258 @ ~4ghz on the stock cooler) - and reap some pretty big improvements in single-core games like WoW. However, since you are also looking at upcoming titles, and the future of gaming looks increasingly multithreaded, I would recommend a hard look at either the Xeon or i7 series of Intel processor with four cores and hyperthreading. Anything from the 2000 series on offers much-improved IPC gains over AMD. Eight virtual cores is probably the most multithreading capability a gamer could justify wanting for the next few years, so I'd go ahead and say that the 6 core processors Intel has on offer are not necessary for gaming unless you plan on spending big now and then milking that machine for more than five years.

defaultluser said:

Yeah, WoW is still single-threaded even today. We have some picky players here that aren't satisfied with their Core i5 2500k at 5.0 GHz!

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1871292

Your processor at stock is beaten by that overclocked Core i5 by about 50-70%.

In fact, you should send a Private Message to GotNoRice, I'm sure he'd be able to help you with suggestions if your frame rate is not to your liking in WoW.

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Ummm.. WoW is not single threaded. Back when I played years ago it was multithreaded.. and you could easily increase performance by just editing a config file to tell it how many/what cores/threads to use on your CPU.

Sure it uses more CPU on the main threads, but it does do some stuff on the other threads as well if you have it set up to do so.

I did want to build a more future focused rig, but I just wanted to know if the six core intel was really worth the cost it's currently at. Good to know that if gaming is all I want a quad core I7 is still top champ

cyclone3d said:

Ummm.. WoW is not single threaded. Back when I played years ago it was multithreaded.. and you could easily increase performance by just editing a config file to tell it how many/what cores/threads to use on your CPU.

Sure it uses more CPU on the main threads, but it does do some stuff on the other threads as well if you have it set up to do so.

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That's basically what we mean most of the time when we say a game is single-threaded. Yeah it might be doing a few other small threads, but the real work is being done on a single massive thread that becomes the limiting factor on the CPU side. WoW is well-known for exhibiting that kind of behavior in large raid type situations. Offloading minor work to other threads, even via manually-controlled config files, can only do so much to mitigate the problem. because the game's not made to evenly distribute its work.

Civilization V also does this, as does Tomb Raider, as does Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, as does a host of other "modern" titles that I've run across. A few small threads here and there, and then one massive thread that just ruins my day, since my CPU is much more single-core performance limited than multicore performance limited. For reference, my CPU is never bound by Witcher 3 or the newly remade Planetside 2, as those game spread themselves across all 12 of my threads - but I can become CPU-bound on Civ V in the late game, especially if the AI has so many land units they are getting their movements hung up on each other (no unit stacking in Civ V).

If I were to build a new PC to make the jump to Intel (Obviosuly means waiting) would I go with a Z97 or a Z170 board? Also what the deuce is a M.2 Solid State drive are they just for laptops?

Honestly whether I'd recommend a Haswell or a Skylake system would depend on your exact budget.

M.2 is a new form factor for storage media that looks and behaves very similarly to the mSATA/mPCI-E connections sometimes found on laptops and motherboards earlier on. Whereas previously the fastest transfer rates you could expect to get without going to very expensive PCI-E based storage media was the 600mb/s ideal of the SATA III interface, or 500mb/s ideal of the 1x PCI-E 2.0 interface on the mPCI-E interface, the M.2 interface combines multiple PCI-E 2.0 lanes to offer a large improvement in interface bandwidth. It helps that the M.2 form factor is not very expensive, and prices for these drives are already approaching a reasonable dollar/gb ratio.

Luni said:

I did want to build a more future focused rig, but I just wanted to know if the six core intel was really worth the cost it's currently at. Good to know that if gaming is all I want a quad core I7 is still top champ

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For your specific situation, no the Intel Core i7 5820K isn't worth it.

Luni said:

If I were to build a new PC to make the jump to Intel (Obviosuly means waiting) would I go with a Z97 or a Z170 board?

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The longer you wait, more than likely it's going to be Z170 as DDR4 RAM prices should be dropping over the next few months. If you need it now and have a really really tight budget, then more than likely Z97 as you can reuse your DDR3 RAM assuming that you're not going to re-purpose your current PC.

hello,

you can also buy a second hand SSD and put your games into it.

your charging times in wow would be greatly improved. and it would remove the stuttering when flying with your mount.

I just bought a crucial M4 120GB for cheap to expand my steam folder into. its great.

you could then save up the money then to buy a skylake config at black friday or just after Christmas for cheap on ebay

joras said:

hello,

you can also buy a second hand SSD and put your games into it.

your charging times in wow would be greatly improved. and it would remove the stuttering when flying with your mount.

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Are you telling us that WoW loads chunks directly from hard storage or something like that?